The Secret Of The Veda Aurobindo - HolyBooks.com

Varuna-Mitra and the Truth 73
mind, understanding. All this evidence taken together seems to
indicate clearly enough that daks.a must have meant at one time
discernment, judgment, discriminative thought-power and that
its sense of mental capacity is derived from this sense of mental
division and not by transference of the idea of physical strength
to power of mind.
We have therefore three possible senses for daks.a in the
Veda, strength generally, mental power or especially the power
of judgment, discernment. Daks.a is continually associated with
kratu; the Rishis aspire to them together, daks. āya kratve,which
may mean simply, “capacity and effective power” or “will
and discernment”. Continually we find the word occurring in
passages where the whole context relates to mental activities.
Finally, we have the goddess Dakshina who may well be a
female form of Daksha, himself a god and afterwards in the
Purana one of the Prajapatis, the original progenitors, — we
have Dakshina associated with the manifestation of knowledge
and sometimes almost identified with Usha, the divine Dawn,
who is the bringer of illumination. I shall suggest that Dakshina
like the more famous Ila, Saraswati and Sarama, is one of four
goddesses representing the four faculties of the Ritam or Truthconsciousness,
— Ila representing truth-vision or revelation,
Saraswati truth-audition, inspiration, the divine word, Sarama
intuition, Dakshina the separative intuitional discrimination.
Daksha then will mean this discrimination whether as mental
judgment on the mind-plane or as intuitional discernment on
the plane of the Ritam.
The three riks with which we are dealing occur as the closing
passage of a hymn of which the first three verses are addressed
to Vayu alone and the next three to Indra and Vayu. Indra in
the psychological interpretation of the hymns represents, as we
shall see, Mind-Power. The word for the sense-faculties, indriya,
is derived from his name. His special realm is Swar, a word
which means sun or luminous, being akin to sūra and sūrya,the
sun, and is used to indicate the third of the Vedic vyāhr.tis and
the third of the Vedic worlds corresponding to the principle of
the pure or unobscured Mind. Surya represents the illumination